FOR JENNY, G was always for God. God was there, God was everywhere. She saw Him in the penumbra of her father’s doubt and her mother’s anger plummeting out rust red. She saw Him in the vast, ululating dreams of all the people she met, and the nebulae that she sometimes woke ecstatically to, a monster gliding along the sea’s black floor, traveling tirelessly despite the weight of human catastrophe, its prehistoric face the face of all time, the face of God.
Then one day God was nowhere. That day, she had come home from the seminary that she attended despite her father’s desire for a doctor or lawyer in the family. She remembered hearing the gurgle of the yellowed refrigerator that they had bought used, and feeling thirsty. After slipping out of her sneakers, she went to pour herself a glass of orange juice. She hoped that her mother remembered to buy the pulpy kind, though most likely she wouldn’t have. That was when Jenny saw an arm in the sink, the small hand outstretched like a mast. A friendship bracelet circled the wrist. She saw the torso of a Chinese American boy she knew, a fifth grader in the neighborhood, protruding from the industrial-size waste bin. The Transformers T–shirt. The boy’s pinkish-blue eyelids pinched shut, as if they had been forced closed, his dark lashes fanning out against his cheeks.
She closed her eyes for a time. It was the creation of her mother’s mad rabble, one of her fits, Jenny told herself, but when she opened her eyes, the boy was still there. It was so humid the windows were steamed up with condensation, but she shivered. Only then she noticed her mother squatting in the corner, still holding a bloody saw that she must have found in the toolbox; she looked frightened, bewildered. Jenny felt a sudden hatred for this woman, but she was her mother—and how could you hate your own mother? She heard moaning and realized that it was her own sounds.
“Calm yourself,” she whispered. “Calm. Yourself.”
The sound of her breath was an underwater sound. Only the thought that the boy had a mother and a father who loved him kept her from running. Her feet moved millimeters at a time. They were so heavy, she thought, this is how prisoners’ feet must feel. Finally she pulled the boy out of the bin, and, while her mother watched, cradled him in her arms. The top of his head touched her chin; she buried her nose in his hair’s minty shampoo and sweat to suffocate the other smell, as she dragged him into a triangle of light and laid him across the tile. Blood now streaked her white T–shirt, her skin of milky pear. She stripped off her clothes, trying to feel clean as each garment dropped away from her. She wiped the blood rising from his severed arm with her blouse. Slowly she ran it down his shoulder’s length and his pale, stained chest. The sun beat down on them through the narrow kitchen windows. Her nipples stood erect as if it were cold. She arranged the dimpled corners near the boy’s lips with her still-clean pinkie so he almost looked peaceful. With her long skirt, she shrouded him. Naked, she kneeled in the pooling blood and, for the last time, prayed.
Her father refused to talk about what happened. Once her mother was institutionalized, the media uproar about “the Korean killer” quieted, and the hate mail from the local community had dropped off, he reopened a clothing store near South Williamsburg in the winter of ’86. They moved away from Flushing. In their new neighborhood of Flatbush, he jogged block after block between cars while listening to vocabulary tapes; he remembered his customers’ birthdays, even the ones who stole from the store, then tried to resell him the very same items the next day.
But there were small betrayals: his tidy professorial look gave way to hair like tangled grapevines that Bacchus would have envied; his teeth browned from forgetting to brush.
Thirsty for somewhere else, he began spending his free time watching Korean soap operas and playing a screeching music he called pansori, whose words Jenny could not understand. He began telling Jenny they never should have left. On the day of his twentieth wedding anniversary, she caught him lying in a mountain of her mother’s lingerie, his nose in the 34B cup of a bra, his hand folded around the crotch of a lace panty.
“You look so much like your mother,” he said as he gazed at her waifish figure.
As for Jenny, she felt like an intruder in the home she had found in the church. Where had God been that day? she asked herself. What had they done to be so punished? She quit the seminary she had just entered; with her family’s new notoriety, her presence seemed hypocritical. But then her father would politely ask, “How was church? How was school?” She did not want to worry him, so she did not correct his assumptions.
Instead she furiously walked the city in dresses resembling togas, for she did not approve of many modern practices, including painted-on jeans and fitted T–shirts. Still, men ogled her skin that burned at the slightest sun, her straight black hair under a sun hat as wide as an extravagant sombrero. That day a man with the crotch of his jeans to his knees tugged at himself and said, “Babe, you can suck my blood anytime.” She gave him the finger, giving herself a small thrill, and walked faster. Canal Street. Chinatown. Midtown. She stalled at the entrance of a church, but was too afraid to go in. Most days she forgot to eat. She returned home exhausted to her father sitting on the sofa waiting up for her, the way he had done for her mother. Once, when she returned home, he put his bare feet up on the table by his dinner: caramel popcorn straight from the microwavable bag, a plate of spicy radish kimchi, apple juice. She watched him from across the room; they might as well have been as distant as Flatbush and Seoul. He made room for her in front of an evening soap opera, and for the first time since her childhood, she smelled the acrid undertone of rice whiskey on him.
He made two pigtails with her hair and tickled her cheeks with their bushy ends.
“Appa,” she said, “how can I help you?”
She wanted so much to help him.
“How lovely it is to have a daughter,” he said.
As she used his shoulder as her pillow, Jenny wished she could pray and make their lives intact again, but when she closed her eyes, she saw the boy. Then she could not pray. Her father, who had prayed only for her mother’s sake, pretended not to notice. All the while, she felt God leave the orifices of her body. The being who had been her life force now kept her at a distance, so she regressed into the person she had been before His grace: a battered sliver of weed in the chaos of the universe.
A year went by. It passed like a silent movie. It felt like a long sleep.
One day in August her father showed up at breakfast, his ashy color restored to peach. He twirled a round fish cake between his fingers like a cigar.
“Pack a bag,” he told Jenny. “Today’s a special day.”
“Where’s there to go?” she asked.
He said, “Good daughters don’t ask questions to their parents, they listen.”
“Then I’m not a good daughter,” she said. But she was happy to be anywhere with him.
Within an hour in the Daewoo sedan, shouting over low-flying airplanes, he told her that they were driving to see her mother.
“You tricked me,” she said, which was not exactly true.
“It was a surprise.” His forehead creased up the way it did when he was annoyed. “Don’t you want to see Omma?”
She sat erect in the passenger seat. She did not want to see her mother, changed as she was.
She said, “Of course I do.”
“You can’t pretend you were born out of a hat,” he said. He reached out to ruffle her hair, then stopped.
The rows of maple trees blurred as the car accelerated. Green highway signs for Trenton flashed below an awning of clouds. She could see it now, the careful planning. In the suitcase, dried squid strips, her mother’s fuzzy sleeping socks and eye mask, the waterfall music on CD she refused to travel without. As if they, mere mortals, could waltz in and rescue her. As if a visit could restore her father’s stolen happiness.
The ward for the criminally insane was as sad as plastic Jesus souvenirs. No matter how festive the more enterprising guards tried to make it—doilies of turkeys across the window sash, a headdressed Pocahontas taped to the door from last year’s holiday season—it was a prison for the afflicted. Jenny walked closely behind her father, avoiding the corners of the waiting room that were round and soft, like a used bar of soap. Even the front desk officer had a wandering eye that made her look as if she had been around sickness for too long and had become infected.
Her mother, called Helen Nam in English, Heeyoung in Korean, and now case 6479274 in the ward, was sitting cross-legged behind the bars like a lady. Her chin dragged in the air as it lifted, a beautiful, broken motion. Her mother’s eyes wandered shyly to her and looked at her—really looked at her. It almost made her mother human to Jenny, but then her mother’s face shifted away as if embarrassed to be seen. That was it. Her mother disappeared, unable to bear herself anymore, and began rattling an invisible tin tray, smacking her lips as if sucking off a bone. She became again the woman with blood on her sinner’s hands.
Behind a window of Plexiglas opposite them, overlooking the small room, a nurse yawned.
Her father’s gray eyes were narrow, fierce with longing. His hands gripped the bars as if he were about to rip them out. No one else was in the room, for him.
“Dangshin…how’s my gonju?” he said.
Behind the concrete wall, Heeyoung’s head dropped and revealed her black hair growing in bluish white, then she haughtily lifted her nose in greeting.
“Hi, Omma,” Jenny said, but she choked on the word for mother.
“Jenny–ah.” Her voice was as light as spring rain. “It’s Jenny, right? It’s been too long, I almost forgot. How long have I been here?”
“A while, Omma.”
Her mother collapsed back into her seat. She rocked precariously on the chair’s edge, her eyes black splinters that absorbed the light around her. She was there but not, Jenny realized, as if murder had changed her and made it impossible for her to return.
Tugging at her hair, her mother seemed exhausted by speaking. Once again the meds had fogged up her world. She spoke slowly, each word a strain on her slowed-down brain. The air, cleared of the din of dim voices, must have become a void of depressing silence.
“Say it,” her mother said. “You’re laughing at my—my ballroom ruins.”
“Omma….”
Her mother’s hands made figure eights in the air.
“I have visited heaven. Yes, I have been with the Lord. My dear, what am I saying?” She struggled, trying to concentrate on Jenny. “You are going to church, aren’t you?”
“Every Sunday,” Jenny lied.
“Make sure you take Daddy with you, or he’ll go to hell,” she said.
“Yes, Omma.”
“Remember when I took you to museums?”
Jenny nodded in encouragement. Her father pushed her away and pressed his face against the bars.
“What can I do for you?” he said. “Anything, anything,” he said, as if this were possible.
Her mother touched the bars between them. They looked hungrily at each other.
The guards and nurse averted their eyes. Jenny thought of the boy in her arms and gagged. A boy who had knocked on their door selling newspaper subscriptions and had been mistaken as the devil. Her chair fell back when she stood up.
“Geejee–be!” her mother screamed at her, banging her wrists against the bars, bird wrists that looked incapable of harm. “How can you wear my face? You stole my face!”
Her father picked up the chair, scraping it upright. He began cajoling her mother through the bars as if she were a child. “No one’s sick in this house,” he had said when she used to sob in bed all morning. “Your mother is not sick!” he had said until he couldn’t.
He turned to Jenny. “Careful,” he said.
“I have to go,” Jenny could only say. First Corinthians 13:13. And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love. But now there was a dead boy. There was her mother, a murderer, and Jenny, incapable of mercy and love.
“Don’t go,” her mother said. Her hands made gauzy gestures in the air. “Come back, uri baby. I’ll be better, I promise.”
“We can make her better,” her father said, and hit the wall with his palm so hard it trembled. “They’ve made her crazy, crazier here. Just listen to her.”
“I’m listening,” her mother said, and a trickle of frightened laughter escaped her. “But I never hear anyone but me, singing.”
Jenny and her father took turns driving past tract homes as ugly as soggy toast, stretches of strip malls with parking lots big enough for a dozen cemeteries, then empty northern roads. They drove as though they were being chased by the story of their lives. As if they were afraid of their dreams, they did not stop for any sustained sleep. He had begged her, please. He never begged, so they were returning to Las Vegas, where the family had spent their first year in America, husband and wife working at a swap meet, as if they could start over again. But two days later in Colorado, just beyond mountains that made the Appalachians look like molehills, he finally parked at a bar cockily called The Bar. A deer and her fawn stared at them, then picked their way up rocks and disappeared in the fog.
“I’m too young to drink, Dad.”
“They won’t care. This is nowhere.”
He skipped to her door and opened it as if the car were a carriage.
They sat at the bar that was dressed up like a gloomy Victorian drawing room. The wall’s wainscoting was chipped and the bar’s worn varnish grooved with the marks of fingernails and coasters. Behind the bartender, there were bottles of liquor and a wall of postcards of other bars and other parties. One of a man in leather jeans with two girls, a brunette and a blonde, in his arms. Other places that were always better than here. Her father ordered a brandy sour. He had not shaved for days; his eyes had darkened to slate. Jenny drooped onto the counter, her head propped up by her thumbs. What if they had fit into the order of things? Would her mother have become as sick as she had? Immigrants. Indeterminate and silenced.
Her father was darkly determined, and plumbed his second brandy sour.
“This place is riffraff.” She swiveled on the leather stool. “Bird shit.”
He stared at her.
“Young lady, watch your language with your father. Your God up there may be watching.”
“God is always watching,” she said, hoping it was true. “He would want you to stop drinking so damn much!”
It felt good to see his shock, to feel him press his hand hard on her mouth until she promised not to speak that way again. Then he drank.
“I wish I could believe again.” His voice was detached. “I wish it were all true, your God thing. I wish I knew how to.”
She began humming a hymn, a melody of grace as he began drinking again, hoping the words she used to believe in would restore him. As the deer panteth for the water, so my soul longeth after you…But she stopped; she did not feel God in the room.
Her father sang “Aeguka,” the Korean national anthem, over the jukebox. He clapped his hands as his voice became louder, a sentimental vibrato as he seemed to escape from his adopted country. He was asked by a Latino man sipping a piña colada to keep his voice down. Her father looked at the stranger with hatred, as if he were facing the very men who had, at different times, bashed in his storefront window, drilled through the roof, and made off with the family’s livelihood and, eventually, his wife’s health. The man was twirling a paper umbrella between his work-worn fingers when her father adjusted his shirtsleeves and, with a sharp swing, punched the man off the stool.
Several bruises later, her father checked them into a motel somewhere in Colorado. He was rumpled, confused.
“How’s your head?” she asked.
“It’s there,” he said.
His eyes did not meet hers; instead he inspected the green velvet curtains, their fabric wafting of gas passed after yogurt, the bedspreads on each twin bed that featured mottled brown versions of a Civil War battle. The room smelled of preserved duck eggs.
He said, “There’s no alarm clock, air-conditioning, or shampoo. Funny! Someone even walked off with your Bible.”
Jenny looked up, annoyed.
He said, “There’s nothing here.”
“What you did at the bar,” she said. “There was no love in it.”
But she was also tight with judgment of herself. Love, it was the greatest challenge.
“I’ve told you a dozen times already.” He jabbed at the dry air. “In the bar, it must have been allergies.”
“Appa, you hit a man.” She sat on the bed, legs crossed. The woolly bedspread prickled her awake. “For the hundredth time, it wasn’t allergies.”
“With some allergies there’s a swelling of the brain. Your personality changes.” He sat on his bed and folded his arms across his chest. “I’ve read about it.”
“Where? In the National Enquirer?”
“It wasn’t me,” he repeated. “It was allergies. It’s true.”
“I’m eighteen, Appa. You need to find your way.”
“Why should I find my way?” He picked at a loose thread in the flat sheet. “You saw her. I saw her. She’s gone, forever.”
She fell backward onto the bed, her face now to the ceiling that was exposed and unpainted, the same sallow yellow of her mother’s face that had seen too little sun. She jumped up on the bed and touched the ceiling.
“What am I going to do?” His jaw was slack. “Nothing’s going to change with time. It’s as if our life never really happened.”
She wanted to pray for him but prayer was now beyond her ken.
“Appa,” she said, “I’ve lost a mother, too.”
They began to cry together. They were quiet as the year that had passed filled the room.
“This is undignified,” he said. “Everyone back home would be satisfied, in secret. That’s the way it is, you know, when you leave the country and fail.”
She hugged him, patting him on his back, then his head, as if to bless him with a power she didn’t have.
“Who cares, Appa,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what anyone thinks.” But God.
She woke up at night slick with sweat and her jaw clenched so tight her molars hurt. She must have been talking in her sleep, asking for forgiveness. It had happened before.
On the bed next to hers, her father sputtered sighs. As his hands glided across the comforter, she wondered if they had shared the same dreams. She moved to his bed and held his hand, trying to comfort him. When his sleep became even, she went to the window. The only living thing outside was a panting Labrador with its tail stiff in the air like a weather vane, rubbing its sex against a truck’s hubcap. The glass frosted over with her breath until the dog became a horse. Her mother was leading it, the enormous horse, the way she had once imagined it into their living room until a younger Jenny, too, had seen its liquid eyes, its steaming breath.
“But you’re not even here,” Jenny whispered. Still, the images resurrected themselves, the way that her mother’s way of seeing had always haunted her. The wild punctuation of her mother’s sentences penetrated her, and through the motel’s double windows, Jenny saw her mother’s body wrapped in a metal corset and naked from the waist down, tiny seraphim grimacing as they licked her with their bruising holy tongues. She touched the windowpane. As the rough tongues bathed and burned her mother clean and made her body sing ecstatic with a song so pure it was silent, Jenny reached for their compassionate light. But when she ran out into the courtyard, there was no light to baptize her. There was only a dulled moon. Only a chicken bone under her foot and the dog looking sore from its rapture.
She went to bed again, but sleep was impossible. So she stuck her head into the refrigerator (the room’s only working appliance) to wake herself up. “Hello, Old Gin,” she said to the quarter-full bottle that her father had somehow sneaked past her, and unscrewed the cap and drank it, coughing, until the bottle was empty. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Moldy Orange.” But when she blinked, the orange became the boy’s head. She pulled back. “Get out of there,” she said. But it stayed where it was.
She returned to bed. She lay, her arms rigid at her sides. When she closed her eyes, there was Janus, two faces looking to the past and the present. A strip of rainbow emerging from pine trees, a gliding Boeing 747, a landscape of miracles. Her eyes flew open. There was her mother.
Frantic movements came from her father’s bed. She sat up. His pants were pushed past his thighs. One of his hands was navigating himself back and forth as if sprinkling a lawn with water. Between pauses he ground his teeth. He was still asleep.
She felt horror, shame. But there was something else. A desire to touch him, to give him back the man who had swallowed a fistful of American soil on his arrival to the strange land, to show where he now belonged, to restore the woman he loved to him, but she was only a human being. The corridor lights created stripy shadows across his face and made him look mad, delighted. A man forging his own heaven. She should leave. Still, she stroked the rise and fall of his modest chest, the ridge of chest hair that divided him. How long it had been since he was loved.
The touch moved her, warmed her in the darkness the way that only love could. Her hand descended. In the conviction of alcohol, the desire to give back his stolen happiness, she reached below for him. Between exhalations, his hand stroked her hair. When his hips rose, she moved her hand faster. His sleep-breath fluttered with happiness. All the time the prayers that had been lodged in her throat deluged out. She prayed for her youth, her dreams, for her faith to be transferred to him. She prayed for Lot and his incestuous daughters, for their sins. She prayed for grace. For forgiveness. For her father’s happiness. By now his hands had pushed up her nightgown and pulled her into a straddle on his stomach. They tugged down her cotton panties with his thumbs, but slowly, as if asking a silent question. His eyes were now open. She raised one leg, then the other, leaning like a dog, and let him find her mother in the folds of her flesh. Soon there was nothing between them but their body’s salt and sin and the endless longing. She lowered herself until his heat warmed her breasts. As his lips closed over her nipple, she began to cry. Appa, Appa, she whispered, as they were purified, washed in the blood of the lamb.
Then she finally saw Him. She was so relieved to be back in God’s presence that it didn’t matter that her eyes and nose were bleeding and her face was peeling off, and her throat scorched from the light and heat of Him. He parted the buildings for her, the steel edifices as flexible as paper, so she flew through the air that raised up enormous collared preachers and men with ten-gallon hats and strippers with metallic dots over their nipples, past the growing black night that devoured until she was in the thunder and the rain, with the ancient sand of the Sinai Desert whipping into her eyes and ears until they were driving with the map He was drawing in her head that would lead their family to salvation. And they were making good progress, until she realized that they were going nowhere at all, and that the rain was coming so fast that the car, no, the bed, floated down the pavement past the Joseon dynasty lacquer wedding chest from their living room, her father’s Webster’s dictionary and his sets of leather-bound photo albums, the rattling kitchen sink, her mother’s Peter, Paul and Mary LPs, past the squeaking front door, past her own porcelain figurines of Abraham, Noah’s ark, Mary, and the manger cast swallowed by water. And finally there he was, baby Jesus the size of a thumb, bobbing on the water’s surface, drowning valiantly like the rest of them.
In the morning over pulpy IHOP pancakes, they read newspapers. The more plates clattered, the more cordial they were to each other. After her father ordered extra crêpes, he didn’t complain when the waitress, so high she couldn’t have told trout from filet mignon, returned balancing Hawaiian pancakes with pineapple slices scalloping their edges. Nothing indicated that they had changed to each other.
“Would you like more syrup?” he asked, and poured maple syrup on Jenny’s plate until her pancakes were soaked.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, and dabbed at their soggy centers with napkins, then realized what he was doing.
“I’m sorry,” he repeated, and swapped their plates.
He leaned on his elbows as if he could not support his own weight.
She moved her food around to the plate’s edge. She couldn’t eat. The pancakes she cut into wedges fit for a bird’s beak.
The same waitress’s big Texan hair sidled up. She slapped down the check, exposing an upper arm punctuated with needle marks, then stood beside the table and waited.
Her father put down exact change, then an average tip.
The waitress’s lips moved as she counted.
“Can’t you give me another buck?” she said. “I’m down on my luck.”
“Miss, you forgot to ask us if we wanted anything more,” her father enunciated as slowly as a language audio tape, careful not to make a mistake. He looked past her as if he were now thinking of something else. “And what happened to filling our coffee cups?”
“Hey,” the woman said. “This isn’t some fancy restaurant.”
“Do I have to argue my tip? Well, then, you didn’t bring us our crêpes,” he said with the same indifference. “And rubber tires are more tasty than your pancakes.”
The woman looked confused. She rapped the table with her knuckle and said, “That’s the meanest thing I heard all day.”
“I’m sure you’re a very nice person,” Jenny said. “He’s not usually like this.”
Her father looked sharply at her. His mouth was a thin line. She looked away.
“I am.” The waitress’s head bobbed up and down. “It’s been hard.”
Jenny added a ten to the bills. It was as soft as tissue paper in her hands.
Her father crushed his napkin into his coffee cup.
“The tip’s more expensive than your pancakes,” he said.
“You’re a good person,” said the woman.
He stood up. “She’s a sacrificing—fool.”
Finally, Las Vegas, a city where a decade ago, they had believed. Hotels glittered, the fountains were spumes of white foam. They drove past a gaggle of Asian women trotting after a raised flag; these women carried buckets for slot machine coins and had on white gloves as if they were attending a golf tournament. In a pink limousine, a shadowy woman licked her fingers, a gremlin of a girl stuck gum in her own hair. They pretended to be absorbed in everything they passed, even the strip joints advertising Colgate commercial models and Miss America finalists. Anything not to look at each other. As they drove, the glitter they left became the green of a suburb that abruptly became a thirsty land fissured with cracks. An eagle circled their car twice, dived, and throttled a roadrunner, a roadrunner that would crack open the neck of a scorpion. The decomposition and derangement and damage that the living and the dead inflicted upon each other—it, too, Jenny now understood, was God’s country. It was also the country of fast-food franchises.
The McDonald’s where her parents had taken the family for their first American meal together was designed as an enormous Happy Meal container. Ronald was painted on one side holding hands with Mayor McCheese, with his other hand waving in the air as his crew of kids headed up the capitalist’s version of the road to Oz. An impossible, perfect happiness.
“It’s still the same,” her father said, his voice wondrous.
As they passed a sculpture of Ronald McDonald by the door, he ran his hand across Ronald’s plastic hair.
Behind him, Jenny found herself doing the same.
They joined the queue of minorities, single parents, and bulky men and women who looked to have gone through a lifetime of Big Macs. Her father watched them as if he were standing at a great distance. But outside the window, Jenny thought, beyond the fun house decor and forced cheer of the Happy Meal box, someone was committing suicide, someone was grieving the murder of their son or daughter, someone was enduring God’s endless tests. The thought connected her to a vast web of strangers, and their confusion and hurt became hers.
They ordered, collected his Big Mac meal and her chicken salad, and slid into a glow–in–the-dark orange booth. He tucked a napkin into his collar and began eating.
Behind them, a girl as round as a pincushion made bobcat sounds. She made certain that she would not be mistaken for any other animal by screaming, “I’m a wild bobcat! I’m a wild bobcat!” between leaps in the quivering booth.
“You were a strange child,” her father said. He squinted, as if seeing a detail from a time long past. “Fasting, praying. You used to draw little crosses into your rice. Every Sunday you had to go.”
“What’s going to happen to us?” Jenny asked.
He put down the Big Mac. Crumpled up his makeshift bib. “I should be the one jailed.”
“I wanted it,” she said. She could not look up. “I wanted to be with you.”
“It’s all I’ve been thinking. What kind of family have we become?” His voice sagged. “Happy luck I’m not Christian, or where would I be at the end?”
“Appa, God forgives His sinners.” She needed to believe that this was true.
He stared out the window to the stretch of blue desert road.
“I’m sorry you look so much like your mother.”
The girl jumped on the trampoline of her seat, spinning the pinwheels in her hair.
“Mommy! You’re not listening! You’re not you’re not you’re not.” Now she sang, “I’m a baobab tree.”
“I’m your father, Jenny. I’m an animal. Worse than an animal. The devil, that’s it.” His head dropped in his hands. “It’s unforgivable.”
“I made it happen.”
“You’re my daughter.”
“You told me about how women in the Joseon dynasty married at thirteen.”
He looked up. In his eyes she saw how it was for him, to be in a world without hope.
“There’s nothing left in Las Vegas.” He stood up. “This is nowhere, too.”
Eighteen, and she felt older than time itself. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Romans 3:23. God must still be there, somewhere, for all of them. She bowed to the table, weeping, one hand across her mouth. She moved across her father and her shame, across the customers and the entire tribe, strangers to one another, all the way to a woman in her lonely cell, whose cries were another kind of prayer.